> “I feel like the power of an idea is woefully underestimated.”
You’ve heard of the “meme”? That afterthought of idea by Richard Dawkins? I first learned of it during COVID lockdown. There was a post—somewhere—linking to a post from NASA making a bunch of their publications available for reading. In these was a whole anthology titled Cosmos and Culture. One of the articles is by a professor and writer Susan Blackmore. She wrote an article, something like, What The Pandorans Knew. In it she makes the argument that what we will find, if we explore the cosmos past earth, is most likely not alien civilizations, but the remains of extinct civilizations. She argues that ideas are in fact dangerous and might just be the death of civilization. And with this in mind, we’re more likely to find evidence of the extinct civilizations than live ones.
It’s a radical idea. At least that’s what I thought until people in positions of trust started into their non-scientific medical ideas during COVID.
While I find memes of great interest, don’t expect to find memes beyond a curiosity.
The big problem is, what can you do with memes that you can’t do with the current academic orthodoxy? I think if it like someone espousing on the merits of their favorite programming language, and the main line language users scoff and say they have work to do.
Neither speculative non-fiction, nor meme theory, nor programming languages compare to the matters of health and wellness. This is the crisis of our time.
You’ve heard of the “meme”? That afterthought of idea by Richard Dawkins? I first learned of it during COVID lockdown. There was a post—somewhere—linking to a post from NASA making a bunch of their publications available for reading. In these was a whole anthology titled Cosmos and Culture. One of the articles is by a professor and writer Susan Blackmore. She wrote an article, something like, What The Pandorans Knew. In it she makes the argument that what we will find, if we explore the cosmos past earth, is most likely not alien civilizations, but the remains of extinct civilizations. She argues that ideas are in fact dangerous and might just be the death of civilization. And with this in mind, we’re more likely to find evidence of the extinct civilizations than live ones.
It’s a radical idea. At least that’s what I thought until people in positions of trust started into their non-scientific medical ideas during COVID.
While I find memes of great interest, don’t expect to find memes beyond a curiosity.
The big problem is, what can you do with memes that you can’t do with the current academic orthodoxy? I think if it like someone espousing on the merits of their favorite programming language, and the main line language users scoff and say they have work to do.
Neither speculative non-fiction, nor meme theory, nor programming languages compare to the matters of health and wellness. This is the crisis of our time.
My2c
https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resour...